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Einstein, Darwin, Galileo, Mendeleev: the names of the great scientific minds throughout history inspire awe in those of us who love science. However, according to Dean Keith Simonton, a psychology professor at UC Davis, the era of the scientific genius may be over. In a comment paper published in Nature last week, he explains why.

The “scientific genius” Simonton refers to is a particular type of scientist; their contributions “are not just extensions of already-established, domain-specific expertise." Instead, “the scientific genius conceives of a novel expertise.” Simonton uses words like “groundbreaking” and “overthrow” to illustrate the work of these individuals, explaining that they each contributed to science in one of two major ways: either by founding an entirely new field or by revolutionizing an already-existing discipline.

Today, according to Simonton, there just isn’t room to create new disciplines or overthrow the old ones. “It is difficult to imagine that scientists have overlooked some phenomenon worthy of its own discipline,” he writes. Furthermore, most scientific fields aren’t in the type of crisis that would enable paradigm shifts, according to Thomas Kuhn’s classic view of scientific revolutions. Simonton argues that instead of finding big new ideas, scientists currently work on the details in increasingly specialized and precise ways.

And to some extent, this argument is demonstrably correct. Science is becoming more and more specialized. The largest scientific fields are currently being split into smaller sub-disciplines: microbiology, astrophysics, neuroscience, and paleogeography, to name a few. Furthermore, researchers have more tools and the knowledge to hone in on increasingly precise issues and questions than they did a century—or even a decade—ago.

But other aspects of Simonton’s argument are a matter of opinion. To me, separating scientists who “build on what’s already known” from those who “alter the foundations of knowledge” is a false dichotomy. Not only is it possible to do both, but it’s impossible to establish—or even make a novel contribution to—a scientific field without piggybacking on the work of others to some extent. After all, it's really hard to solve the problems that require new solutions if other people haven't done the work to identify them. Plate tectonics, for example, was built on observations that were already widely known.

And scientists aren't done altering the foundations of knowledge, either. In science, as in many other walks of life, we don’t yet know everything we don’t know. Twenty years ago, exoplanets were hypothetical. Dark energy, as far as we knew, didn't exist.

Simonton points out that “cutting-edge work these days tends to emerge from large, well-funded collaborative teams involving many contributors” rather than a single great mind. This is almost certainly true, especially in genomics and physics. However, it's this collaboration and cooperation between scientists, and between fields, that has helped science progress past where we ever thought possible. While Simonton uses “hybrid” fields like astrophysics and biochemistry to illustrate his argument that there is no room for completely new scientific disciplines, I see these fields as having room for growth. Here, diverse sets of ideas and methodologies can mix and lead to innovation.

Simonton is quick to assert that the end of scientific genius doesn’t mean science is at a standstill or that scientists are no longer smart. In fact, he argues the opposite: scientists are probably more intelligent now, since they must master more theoretical work, more complicated methods, and more diverse disciplines. In fact, Simonton himself would like to be wrong; “I hope that my thesis is incorrect. I would hate to think that genius in science has become extinct,” he writes.

I don’t think we've seen the end of the scientific genius; it’s just hard to know where science will take us next. After all, in the first century, a Roman engineer named Julius Frontinus wrote, “inventions reached their limit long ago, and I see no hope for further development.” Look at us now.

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Someone help me out with this - why does a pseudo-scientist's opinion on science matters one whit?

It's a bit cruel to call a psychologist a pseudo-scientist. Psychology is probably a good demonstration that he's probably wrong. This is a highly descriptive field without strong disprovable predictive theories, similar to biology over 50 years ago.

From the article, I do think this psychologist is falling into a bit of a trap, though. It reminds me of an evolutionary biologists who argued that evolution must have operated differently in the early periods of life on Earth because they generated so many important species—basically arguing that the earliest species were more pluripotent than the later species.

In the period of physics just prior to 1905, it was also said that it was hard to imagine any new discoveries could be made. Electromagnetism had unified electricity and magnetism. Most of physics was thought to just be adding a few more decimal places. There were just a few odd corners to figure out, like black body radiation, the photoelectric effect, and the slight deviation of the orbit of Mercury—very esoteric things that were in all likelihood completely explainable by known principles and not very interesting at all.

Physicists tell each other stories about this time. When a physicists tells you that all that remains is adding a few more decimal places, she's probably smirking.

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Kate Shaw Yoshida
Kate is a science writer for Ars Technica. She recently earned a dual Ph.D. in Zoology and Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior from Michigan State University, studying the social behavior of wild spotted hyenas. Emailkate.shaw@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KateYoshida

150 Reader Comments

Depends on the definition. A genius is rare recognized at the time. We will have to wait to see who today will be the next we push upon the label genius. Looking at Einstein, his work was also iterative or incremental for the most part. His work at a unified theory was not so much celebrated but it was looking at things in a different manner and far less iterative than what he is celebrated for.

Depends on the definition. A genius is rare recognized at the time. We will have to wait to see who today will be the next we push upon the label genius. Looking at Einstein, his work was also iterative or incremental for the most part. His work at a unified theory was not so much celebrated but it was looking at things in a different manner and far less iterative than what he is celebrated for.

.. and so is Hawking's work. It built on Einsteins's work and I'd say many would consider him a genius in his field.

Also about the last quote - it was said back in 1899 too

Quote:

Everything that can be invented has been invented. Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899

The notion he holds of genius is just the reflective quasi-deification of individuals over the group that the society of the times allowed. Scientists (and people in general) of today are more likely to cause a stink and demand to be recognized if they contributed to any great finding, and we, as a group are more sensitive to recognizing all involved since it's now easier to prove idea lineages with widely available and searchable publications.

Today we have more infrastructure to support the pursuit of scientific knowledge than at any other point in the entirety of human history. We may have millions of "geniuses" operating in all of these specialized fields today without even realizing it. How many geniuses would we have had during the age of Newton if billions of people were both in existence and required to attend school through the age of 16 or 18?

“It is difficult to imagine that scientists have overlooked some phenomenon worthy of its own discipline,”

Sure it is hard to imagine, in the specific, revolutionary changes before (and even as) they develop. That is inherent in their nature.

Further, I think he is stuck on the idea of a singular genius. That does indeed difficult when you have so damn many amazingly brilliant people at hand. Further I think even the idea of the singular genius is more a lens through which the past is viewed, a way to organize and catalogue history which gets a whole lot muddier under close examination.

Hogwash. He probably would have said the same thing a decade before Einstein or Galileo emerged.

The biggest difference between then and now is that brillliant people are more lilely to be indistinguishable from the noise around them. They're doing great work, but most people don't notice because we're bombarded by so many confilicting sound bytes and images. 30 or 40 years from now somebody will recognize them for what they were.

There's still room for Scientific genius. There's still a lot we don't know. I think if and when we colonize space we'll learn a lot more and a few "geniuses" will sprout up. Perspective changes everything.

I think it's really early to agree that there will be no new specialties in existing fields. It's far more likely that, because of ever-increasing specialization, the general public won't find out about it.

Both the article author and the psychologist from UC Davis fundamentally misinterpret how scientific revolutions happen, and what Kuhn argued. He said ALL scientists are engaged in "normal science", fundamentally and ineluctably rooted in the field paradigm they have, willingly, subscribed to in order to go to school, publish, and investigate. No one sets out to revolutionize science. Only when anomalies crop up, either serious enough ones or enough of them, does a "crisis" happen and a new theory take its place after a paradigm shift. It's completely involuntary, and the profession is built to combat them. Can't be any other way.

Also, the psych professor is quoting Karl Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery and passing it off as his own. Someone should tell him to shut up and sit down until he actually understands the philosophy and sociology of science.

I agree that many fields have sort of "peaked". By that I mean they are mountains. Over the centuries, those mountains were built. Today we're focusing more on bridging the gaps between specializations.

The true danger of this is that people are getting content with things the way they are. The assumption that there's no room for further improvement is a dangerous one. As soon as we stop seeking new disciplines, or stop attempting the "impossible" we will be in the same state that we were hundreds of years ago when everyone KNEW that the earth was flat, or that the sun orbited the earth, etc. I hope we never stop striving to be better than we are or seeking new knowledge where most assume none can be found.

Dean Keith Simonton is a psychologist.Simonton is just not up on the current state of science.He knows there never was and never will be a "genius" in his field, so he's just looking for a way to discredit the concept in a veiled attempt to heighten what he is capable of.(And no, Sigmund Freud wasn't a genius. He was a pseudo-scientist quack that thought Cocaine was a magic cure-all.)

Anyone who is up to speed on any particular scientific field will know half a dozen scientists who would fit the definition.

Gutsy claim. I'd argue that a lot of breakthrough discoveries in science have actually been ideas hatched from elegant simplicity. Einstein's theory of relativity is a classic example of this.

I'd argue there is plenty of room left for discoveries (usually attributed to 'genius') that share similar attributes so far as simple yet far reaching implications are concerned. Personally I feel that while strong intellectual capability plays a role, there is also a very important creative element that goes into a substantial amount of our advances of bigger scientific ideas and principles. (What exactly is 'genius'? Is it something measurable, quantifiable? Or is it just a label we slap on folks after they make a substantial achievement or insightful contribution? The author tries to make a definition of what pertains to scientific genius, but at the same time I recall only recently a famous salesman by the name of Steve Jobs receiving a similar label which to me was absolutely absurd.)

With this in mind, who is to say that we're even close to exhausting the pool of potential that intellect + creative thinking among scientists is concerned? And outside of that, who's to say major advances even have to strictly emerge from within the scientific community? Recall Einstein tinkered away on his ideas in his free time AND while working in a completely unrelated field.

I won't deny that the granular nature a lot of scientific disciplines are undergoing as they become increasingly technical and focused means that wider and 'bigger' ideas may well become further apart, but at the same time I strongly feel the likelihood of major new discoveries and ideas will continue to occur.

I can't recall the physicist, but many moons ago when the basic principles of the electron were beginning to be realised, one gentlemen found himself getting rather over-confident and stated (I can't recall the exact wording) "gentleman, physics as we know it will be over in six months" which is another way of me saying that over-confidence in predictions isn't exactly something new. We've had bouts of over-confidence and sweeping judgements plenty of times. Anyone who's familiar with the history of astronomy and cosmology will know full well what I mean here, so for me personally I find it silly to all of a sudden place some cap on our potential and suggest that our ability to make breakthrough discoveries (that I personally attribute to what could be considered genius) is on the wane.

Hell, the argument that high technology and deeper specialisation contributes to this waning 'genius' potential I think could be looked at in the other way - folks might well emerge being able to pour over a large array of well researched concepts and flesh out completely new ideas at high levels just as, if not more efficiently than in the past.

TL;DR - I think its folly to put a cap on unrealised potential and I think its folly to suggest we're beginning to see less forward thinking and insightful discoveries attributed to insightful individuals. If anything, we're only getting started.

I call BS. There are so many fields where our knowledge is in its infancy... and those are just the things we know we don't know. There is plenty of space for genius; that most breakthroughs are produced collaboratively isn't surprising. Einstein didn't work in a bubble.

“It is difficult to imagine that scientists have overlooked some phenomenon worthy of its own discipline,” Here is a man that doesn't seem to understand science.

The genius thing is it's own issue that is psycological. Many great minds that discovered important ideas or etc made... some other questionable life choices at times. Being a "Genius" may be overrated or misunderstood. We like to put folks on a pedestal and forget flaws. Einstein may have given us Relativity, but he was against Quantam Physics IIRC. You know, the thing that's given us computers and the internet. Clearly QP is wrong, because Einstein is a genius and knows better.

Genius is an ideological concept of relatively primitive human beings. Likely, as part of our biology, social groups identified individuals with particular gifts that were likely to make unusual contributions to the group. Such human beings were granted a priviledged status in order to realize the benefit of that gift. Most likely the gift was generally the result of some kind of deviant genes. The reality of modern science is that only theoretical physics and mathematics depend on that kind of exceptional individual. Those fields are already relatively mature. There is always a possibility of the unexpected. But, there is not a high probablility of a big impact as a result of people with very exceptional minds. The fields of science and technology that have been most important over the last half century have been biology and computer technology. Moore's law is the major characteristic. That is a more or less regular exponential rate of advancement. Clearly, that advancement has to depend on people who are essentially tools rather than some eratic priestly gift from above. Those who are successful are surely above average in the types of intelligence that are important to their work. But, organizational ability and social skills are often far more important than extreme technical skills. Technical advancement in biology and automation will probably be the most important phenomena of this century. But that advancement will mostly be the work of nerdy engineers who are regarded as tools rather than high priests of some romantic scientific ideology.

The definition defines the decision. if we define genius as someone who has exceptional intellectual ability, creativity, or originality, then its obviously a flawed statement to say the Scientific genius is an endangered species. The further restrictions we place on the definition, the more Simonton can be proven correct.

Any model can be proven if you restrict enough variables. Caeteris paribus? People are forced to specialize in any/all fields because there is so much more information in the scientific process than there used to be. Its natural, and in no way a loss.

The guy who proved Format's Last Theorem in 1995 worked secretly in his attic for years. How is that any different than Einstein toiling away on relativity after working days at the patent office?

And it's entirely possible that the next "lone genius" in physics will be whoever comes up with a hypothesis for what Dark Matter is... or Dark Energy... or comes up with an underlying mechanism for quantum mechanics... or unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics... or any of a number of unanswered physics questions.

Certainly, there are fields that don't lend themselves to individual genius in the same way. Molecular biology comes to mind. Determining how genes interact with the "junk" parts of DNA just doesn't lend itself to a lone-thinker. There's lots of genes and lots of junk DNA, and the various interactions may each work slightly differently (or maybe even completely differently). Those types of problems will be solved by the efforts of many scientists prodding away in different labs at different parts of the problem. But when someone finally figures out why primates don't clone as easily as sheep (or more specifically, how to fix the problem that primates don't clone as easily)... that guy might just be one of those lone figures in a lab somewhere.

Simonton points out that “cutting-edge work these days tends to emerge from large, well-funded collaborative teams involving many contributors” rather than a single great mind.

This really suggests that he's getting confused between the different aspects of scientific progress.

Sure, experimental work these days is increasingly conducted by large, and sometimes massive groups of people, very often from a wide range of institutions. It's unlikely we'll see anyone emerge as a lone, break-through experimentalist in the same class as Rutherford or Faraday. But while experimentation is utterly vital and central to the entire process, it's only part of the picture. Science needs people who can make sense of all the data we collect, and who can assemble theories that advance our understanding (and generate new experiments to do). While this, too, is often a collaborative process, there's ample room for genius to manifest itself here, and plenty of holes crying out to be filled.

Not sure if this is true, but it's a story I've heard a few times: Towards the end of the 19th century bright young men (this was the Victorian era) were actively encouraged not to study physics. Newton, Farady and Maxwell had sewn the whole thing up, and there was very little for them to do. There were only really two phenomena that weren't completely understood: black-body radiation and the precession of the orbit of Mercury, and these would surely be solved very soon ... The first led to quantum mechanics and the second to General Relativity, and those overturned everything.

I hope we've learned to be careful about estimating the completeness of our understanding.

I hereby posit that people who think any given thing is a thing of the past are a thing of the past.

In any case, has the author been able to show in any way that the frequency of the emergence of these types of geniuses has diminished, or shown any sign of diminishing? And if so, are there any measures that compensate for relatively recent advancements that have not only potentially increased the opportunity for geniuses of this type to shine, but perhaps even more greatly increased the opportunity for their 'signal' to be more obscured by 'noise', thereby complicating efforts in measuring frequency?

“It is difficult to imagine that scientists have overlooked some phenomenon worthy of its own discipline,” Here is a man that doesn't seem to understand science.

The genius thing is it's own issue that is psycological. Many great minds that discovered important ideas or etc made... some other questionable life choices at times. Being a "Genius" may be overrated or misunderstood. We like to put folks on a pedestal and forget flaws. Einstein may have given us Relativity, but he was against Quantam Physics IIRC. You know, the thing that's given us computers and the internet. Clearly QP is wrong, because Einstein is a genius and knows better.

Einstein wasn't against quantum mechanics. He simply thought we'd find an explanation that didn't require a "dice-roll". We still haven't.

Going by Kuhn's model, there should be numerous scientific revolutions in progress, though they may be obscure. Nutrition looks pretty ripe, as there seems to be an interesting debate occurring between low-carb and low-fat paradigms:

Also, the current economic crisis has spawned intense interest in using a certain approach to fission (molten salt reactors and thorium) to dramatically lower the cost of clean energy. Perhaps we're rediscovering "lost" genius?

The "split-brain" model for psychology has seen a bit of resurgence, but what I found remarkable was that the gestation for this goes back to Boris Sidis and William James at Harvard over a century ago.

And that's just for starters. I know there's plenty more out there, especially when we get into the scientific examination of history....

Welp, time to hurry up with cloning the human brain in transistor form. Once we've got one of those, we can ask it to redesign itself and scale itself up and pretty please solve all our crap we're currently incapable of dealing with.

Just machines that make big decisionsprogrammed by fellows with compassion and visionWe'll be clean when their work is doneWe'll be eternally free yes and eternally young

Solutions come from problems, and problems come from applications of existing solutions. One of the biggest impediments to pure science today is that a lot of what we learned in the second half of the 20th century has been very sparsely applied. We're a bit like Hero of Alexandria, who invented the steam engine in the first century AD, only to find no practical applications for his clever toy.

Someday there will be another cultural rennaissance which will see modern science applied and tomorrow's problems framed. Right now we're in a kind of bread-and-circus dark age, capable of driving our semiconductor physics toward the problem of mobile entertainment, but not much else. But our applications of existing solutions have their fair share of problems -- especially in the social sciences -- and these problems will inspire new solutions.

We couldn't possibly stand still even if we tried. Adaptation is what we do. It's why we're not apes. And it's why periods of navel-gazing never last for very long. To continue the metaphor of Ancient Greece: even the extremely reactionary Spartans could not hold back the tides of change and progress.

To claim we know of all the fields there are is, in my view, the height of hubris. We've spent centuries trying to break out of this sort of bullshit. We're learning all the time how many of our "things we know" have been incomplete, at best. What a load of shit this guy has spewed out.

Geniuses are only for the plebs. Everyone else knows that every single discovery has been made on the basis of previous research. Geniuses are like heroes during war times. They increase the moral and are more effective at raising funds. This doesn't mean that there aren't great mathematicians.

edit: I forgot to mention that even Einstein first created his special theory on relativity on previously published experimental results and he used the mathematical methods by Poincare.